Which Animal's Fossil Record Shows Good Evidence For Evolutionary Changes: Mice Whales Sparrows Dogs

Editor's note: As Creation magazine has been continuously published since 1978, we are publishing some of the articles from the archives for historical interest, such as this. For pedagogy and sharing purposes, readers are brash to supplement these historic articles with more than up-to-date ones suggested in the Related Articles and Further Reading below.

A whale of a tale

Gaps in the fossil record; the lack of transitional forms; bear witness of design; massive catastrophism; sudden appearance of animals in the fossil record; enormous sedimentary layersin fact, virtually all of the major arguments used past creationist scientists to combat molecules-to-man development—evolutionary history explains them all! At least, that's according to Dr Steve Jones, Professor of Genetics at University College, London, in his updated version of Darwin's The Origin of Species, entitled About Like A Whale.¹

*Ambulocetus*, another alleged 'walking whale', was reconstructed as in the other diagram (come across below). Its supposed skeleton was drawn every bit beneath, simply only the parts in yellow were really found, which did not include crucial features needed to back up its claimed condition as a 'transitional' creature betwixt country animals and whales.

Why don't we see intermediate forms today illustrating evolution? Yous wouldn't wait to if you really understood the process of development.

But, co-ordinate to long-age interpretations of the fossil record, some animals have remained unchanged for millions of years, while others appear or disappear of a sudden. Well, that'south what you lot'd expect from development!

And how about some animals that evidence 'credible miracles of complexity?' This simply reveals the 'force of natural choice'.²

In fact, it doesn't matter what arguments creationists use, it doesn't matter what i finds in the universe—what you detect is exactly what you would look if evolution were true! Besides which, 'evolution is impossible to deny',³ and 'No biologist tin work without the theory of evolution'.^four

Such are the summarized ramblings of Jones, who, using the same chapter headings as Darwin, updated each section with the supposed latest and greatest evidences for molecules-to-man development. At the same time, he took every opportunity to shake his fist at the Creator God of the universe.

Jones calls this 400-page piece of work 'a post-modernist treatment of evolution', ^five but anyone expecting to come beyond startling new challenges to cause creationists to cringe or run for embrace will be disappointed. This is just a rehash of the usual (sometimes outdated and already rejected) evolutionary arguments, with some additional examples of them, all presented with religious fervour.

PakicetusForm — *Pakicetus*, an alleged transitional form betwixt land animals and whales, was reconstructed in evolutionary texts as shown. Still the bones plant were only the portions of the skull shown correct in blue—the legs and arms were pure imagination.

PakicetusSkull — *Pakicetus*, an alleged transitional form betwixt land animals and whales, was reconstructed in evolutionary texts as shown. Still the bones plant were only the portions of the skull shown correct in blue—the legs and arms were pure imagination.

Jones begins the book by stating that 'no scientist denies the central truth of The Origin, the idea of descent with modification … development is inevitable'.⁶ Nosotros are told that development 'depends on mistakes in reproduction'^six and life is 'a series of successful mistakes'.^seven

To set the scene for the balance of the book, Jones wants to make certain we don't think too highly of ourselves. He says, 'We are all branches on a common tree and share descent with primates and, for that matter, with pigs'.^viii Remember that the next time you have bacon for breakfast!

Consistent with the championship, whale evolution, one of his major planks, features early on. He regurgitates that typical whale development story involving the alleged transitional forms, Pakicetus, Ambulocetus and Basilosaurus. He makes the outlandish claim that, 'With these fossils, almost all the steps from land animal to leviathan have been found.'⁹ What are the facts?

Pakicetus has been imaginatively reconstructed every bit a 'walking whale' from some teeth, skull and jaw fragments. The bony show is consistent with it being a land mammal. Its hearing appliance was that of a land mammal, and information technology was constitute buried with other country mammals. [Ed. notation: see Whale Development?, showing how farther evidence published subsequently this article shows that Pakicetus was a completely terrestrial mammal and naught similar the reconstruction shown.]
There are more than bones present in Ambulocetus (dated later on than true whales, incidentally).^x But fifty-fifty here the crucial bits are missing. Ane evolutionist writes: 'Since the pelvic girdle is not preserved, at that place is no directly prove in Ambulocetus for a connexion between the hind limbs and the axial skeleton.'^xi
Basilosaurus, known of for over 100 years, has no such missing parts. This oddly serpentine creature had functional reproductive claspers which gave rise to the claim that they 'devolved' from hind legs. But a famous evolutionist fossil skilful writes of this entire group that information technology 'could non perchance have been bequeathed to any of the modern whales'.¹²

Speciation is not necessarily evolution

Jones proceeds to give many examples of speciation (the formation of new species): dogs, pigeons, horses, cats, roses, mice, oxen, antelopes, finches, crows, lizards and others. Creationists do non disagree with such observations. In fact, we indicate out that it is an important part of the Biblical Creation/Flood model. Only we too point out that the changes occur only within the data already present, which follows naturally from the Biblical teaching that living things were to reproduce 'after their kind'.

Crucially, in none of these examples is at that place any new information (resulting in brand new characteristics) generated. In fact, within the 'daughter' grouping there is less genetic data than in the grouping from which information technology descended.

In spite of this, Jones continually calls such changes 'development', thus indoctrinating his readers to believe that any form of change in living things is part of the evolutionary process. But if yous continue a downhill procedure forrard in time, it volition not add upwards to a massive uphill process. Put another mode, adding upwards lots of losses will non effect in a net gain. But fish-to-philosopher evolution demands massive cyberspace information gains.

BasilosaurusIsis — *Basilosaurus isis* is the proper name given to the fossil creature featured in this display. Though declared by some evolutionists to have been an ancestor of modernistic whales, other evolutionists say its anatomy precludes this.

Despite the fact that all breeding pick processes practice is sort the information already present, plus concentrate a few inherited genetic defects, Jones states that 'the best place to see evolution is on the subcontract'¹³ and says, 'A domestic dog show is development chalked out for all to behold.'¹⁴ Creationists have long pointed out that wolves and dogs are the same created kind. The downhill processes of selecting from the information already present accept led to domestic dogs, and still further to the 'pure' (i.e. more and more genetically 'thinned out') breeds of today. Jones's argument that a dog 'is a barely evolved wolf'¹⁵ serves only to maintain the semantic confusion around the word 'evolution'. By labelling all genetic changes, even downhill ones, as 'evolution', he makes it seem as if he has thereby proved that particles turned into people.

In fact, Jones advisedly weaves a web of what can simply be called cant in setting up his readers to reject Biblical Cosmos and the account of the Flood. Having documented new species forming, he continually calls this speciation 'evolution'. He and so cleverly sets upwardly a 'straw man' for the unsuspecting reader so as to be able to 'annihilate' creationists. He states, 'Nobody, say the anti-evolutionists, has e'er seen a species ascend. That, as information technology happens [and as he has painstakingly shown in the previous pages], is non true …'.¹⁶

During this indoctrination procedure, he states that 'the world may contain a hundred million different kinds of plant and animal'.¹⁷ He is preparing the ground to bring upwards the usual simply fallacious argument that Noah couldn't accept fitted all the state animate being kinds on the Ark. He states, 'Noah, the world's 2d taxonomist (after Adam), had to decide who to allow on to his Ark.'¹⁸

Not the moth fraud, surely …

Jones continues with a typical neo-Darwinian give-and-take of natural selection and mutation as the basic mechanism for molecules-to-homo evolution. He states, 'Natural selection is a auto that makes most impossible things'.¹⁹ He then illustrates this using the example of—look for information technology—England's brindled moths. For one thing, this did not involve mutation. It was at most a fairly lilliputian example of natural pick shifting relative proportions of two varying types within a population back and forth. Moths, resting on tree trunks in the daylight, were 'picked off' by birds more readily depending on whether they were night or light in relation to how light or night the bark was.

Even the famous biologist 50. Harrison Matthews, in the foreword to the 1971 edition of Origin of Species, conceded that selection of peppered moths did not show 'evolution in activeness'. But nosotros know now that such moths practice not residue on tree trunks in daylight. The photos in countless textbooks are fraudulent; dead moths were glued or pinned onto the trees.²⁰

Apropos the human middle, Jones, in what seems to be the real motive behind the book, shakes his fist at God by claiming, 'The feeblest designer could improve it'.²¹ He calls it the work of 'an insensible drudge: an instrument, similar all others, built by a tinkerer rather than by a trained engineer.' Incidentally, this has been thoroughly discredited in our refereed journal TJ, by an expert in ophthalmologic function and design.²²

Professor Steve Jones^one, the author of Almost Like a Whale (described as 'a modern version of Darwin's Origin of Species'), interviewed by The Science Show ², on why people die, said:

'What happens is that any gene which increases our ability to reproduce ourselves … will be favoured even if information technology's tremendously expensive subsequently reproduction has taken place. So that's why children are healthy and sometime people are unhealthy. What matters is living long plenty to pass on your genes. One time you've passed on your genes you don't matter in the Darwin Machine, so you lot die.'

Dept. of Biology (Galton Laboratory), University College London.
Circulate on ABC radio (Commonwealth of australia) on 5 May, 2001.

Similar Darwin, Jones sees a globe total of expiry and decay. He would not, of course, accept our sin, through the Fall and the resultant Expletive on creation, every bit being responsible for the mess we find around us. He goes into peachy detail to ensure the reader is almost repulsed past a 'nature red in tooth and hook.' Fifty-fifty though he doesn't say it in these words, 1 can hear him saying, how can there be a God of love in this world of expiry, disease, violence and suffering? Every bit he states, '…information technology may not be a logical deduction, simply to my imagination it is far more satisfactory to look at such instincts equally the young cuckoo ejecting its foster-brothers … not as specially endowed or created instincts, only as pocket-sized consequences of one full general constabulary, leading to the advocacy of all organic beings, namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.'

Jones certainly seems familiar with the Bible and its business relationship of Cosmos, referring to many Biblical passages throughout. He refers to Adam and Eve (come across What was the original sin? beneath) equally he begins an explanation for the evolution of sex—showing clearly how he views the morality of this effect. He says, 'Sex … is a biological marketplace. Every species is, more or less, a sexual republic. Inside each, open exchange is the rule and every inhabitant has a gamble to barter its Dna with any other.'²³

Does Jones e'er admit any weaknesses in evolution? He does say, echoing Darwin: 'Geology assuredly does non reveal any finely graduated organic chain, and this is the most obvious and gravest objection which tin be urged against the theory of development.'²⁴ Notwithstanding, he and so tries to substantiate that this is what you lot would await to find. Later all, there take been many catastrophes that destroy evidence—fossilization is a rare event because beast flesh and basic decay quickly. Simple statistics show the fallacy of his argument; how odd that the transitional forms Darwinism requires are preferentially destroyed! He goes to great lengths to discuss the subversive force of water, and even says, 'The turmoil of the rocks ways that fossils are not laid down in neat sequence in an ordered earth'.²⁵

He then derides those who believe in Noah's Flood past subtle intimidation: 'The nineteenth century preferred to come across the past swept away by acts of God. Disasters were an excuse for non thinking.'²⁶

His arguments concerning the age of the sediments and the Earth are the usual ones creationists have heard for years and have answered many times earlier: The Green River Shales of Wyoming,²⁷ radiometric dating,²⁸ chalk beds,²⁹ fossil reefs,²⁹ etc.

Truly this considerable work is an illustration of fallen human as portrayed so graphically in Romans 1 as he 'exchanged the glory of the uncorruptible God for an paradigm made similar corruptible man, and to birds, and four-footed beasts, and creeping things' (Romans 1:23). The same chapter indicates that fallen people do not 'like to retain God in their cognition' (v. 28).

Romans 1:21 says: 'Considering that, when they knew God, they glorified him non as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened.' Sadly, no better example of this tin be found than Jones's statement concerning the legs of English sparrows introduced into the United states. Applying his bullheaded faith in supposed unlimited variation in genetics (contradicted by real science), he refers to the lengthening of these sparrows' legs past a mere 5% in a century and says: 'Although information technology is not known to what extent the change in sparrow shape is due to genes rather than to a straight response to the surroundings, evolution at that speed would bring along a sparrow with the legs of an ostrich in just ten yard years.'³¹

This piece of work, acclaimed by the secular world, has come, and will become. However, 'The grass withers, the blossom fades: but the discussion of our God shall correspond ever' (Isaiah 40:8).

What was the original sin?

Despite Jones's obvious familiarity with the Bible, he seriously misleads his readers about the whole issue of human sexuality and the Fall.

On page 184 of the book discussed here, he says, 'Adam and Eve fell into temptation when they ate the tomato of the tree of knowledge … Sex, the trap into which the inhabitants of Eden barbarous … .' Not only does the Bible say nothing about a tomato or whatever other label for the fruit of the tree, Jones libels the Genesis business relationship by maintaining that Adam and Eve were tempted by Satan into having sexual practice. Adam and Eve, as hubby and married woman, were told past God, prior to the temptation and Fall, to 'be fruitful and multiply' (Gen. i:28)—hardly possible without sexual intercourse! The original sin was the rejection of God's authorisation, in the eating of a literal fruit from a literal tree, which was the only thing they had been told non to practice. Information technology resulted from non trusting God's Word ('Has God really said?'), and from pride, the desire to be similar God.

In fact, this thought that the Autumn had to practice with sexual practice is such a ridiculous caricature of the Bible'due south teaching on sexuality that one suspects it was deliberate, in order to further inoculate people against Biblical Christianity (the play Inherit the Wind, an anti-Christian distortion of the famous 1925 Scopes 'Monkey Trial', also falsely puts this same nonsense into the mouth of the lawyer defending cosmos).¹

Jones has written another pop development-based book, in which he also engages in repeated subtle ridicule of Christianity. In it, he says, 'Sexual practice … led to the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, Eve the more culpable as she tempted Adam towards immorality (a persistent theme in the credo of gender, in which sexual blame is usually placed on females).'²

Imagine the outcry if an academic were to so repeatedly and blatantly, on such a widely published scale, misrepresent any other major document of antiquity.

See Menton, D., Inherit the Current of air: an historical analysis, Creation xix(i):35–38, 1996.
Jones, South., In the Blood: God, Genes and Destiny, Flamingo, UK, p. 245, 1996.

AIDS and Evolution

Scanning electron micrograph of HIV-ane, colored greenish, budding from a cultured lymphocyte.

Steve Jones'due south rewrite of Darwin'south Origin majors on the AIDS virus every bit one of the best examples of evolution. Nevertheless, more than a decade ago nosotros wrote extensively in demolition of this merits.¹

Copying (genetic) defects (mutations) in viruses may be the cause of major changes in infectivity simply by random reshuffling of the code on their exterior.

An immune system 'trained' to discover enemy soldiers of one type will not recognize them if they have 'changed uniform', in effect. Such random shuffling back and along may of course beautifully demonstrate mutation and natural selection, but does not remotely show these in the process of propelling an organism 'uphill'.

The changes do not evidence any increase in functional complexity; they are all strictly 'horizontal'. I.due east., they do not add any information.

In any example, viruses can never demonstrate development in living things because they are non themselves living. They require the machinery of an already living, fully complex organism to reproduce.

Thus, viruses tin't be evolutionary ancestors of other life-forms; informed evolutionists exercise not regard these not-living 'cellular parasites' as being intermediate between life and non-life, for example. Viruses must always remain viruses; at best they tin can exist used to 'argue by (faint) analogy'.

The way Jones uses the AIDS virus in his book is every bit misleading every bit his sections on speciation (meet primary text), since it gives the impression that its ability to mutate and exist selected for is a demonstration of observed evolution. Yet no matter how many millions of years it were to go on for, such a process is not remotely capable in principle of turning a virus into anything other than a virus—not even into a living organism, let alone a progressively more than circuitous ane.

Wieland, C., Has AIDS evolved? Cosmos 12(iii):29–32, 1990.

References and notes

Jones, Due south., Almost Like a Whale: the Origin of Species updated, Doubleday, London, 1999. Return to text.
Ref. 1, p. 157. Render to text.
Ref. 1, p. 21. Return to text.
Ref. 1, p. 22. Render to text.
Ref. 1, p. xxi. Return to text.
Ref. ane, p. xxii–xxiii. Return to text.
Ref. ane, p. xxvi. Return to text.
Ref. ane, p. xxvii. Render to text.
Ref. i, p. 18. Return to text.
Batten, D., A whale of a tale? CEN Tech. J. 8(one):2–three, 1994. Return to text.
Berta, A., What is a whale? Science 263(5144):180–181, Thewissen, J.G.Yard., Hussain, S.T., Arif, 1000., Fossil bear witness for the origin of aquatic locomotion in archaeocete whales, pp. 210–212, 1994. Return to text.
Stahl, B.J., Vertebrate History: Problems in Evolution, McGraw-Hill, New York, p. 489, 1974. Render to text.
Ref. ane, p. 25. Render to text.
Ref. ane, p. 27. Render to text.
Ref. 1, p. xl. Render to text.
Ref. 1, p. 129. Return to text.
Ref. one, p. 50. Render to text.
Ref. one, p. 51. Of grade, information technology was not Noah'southward decision, only God's. Return to text.
Ref. one, p. 75. Return to text.
Every bit documented in Wieland, C., Cheerio, peppered moths, Creation 21(3):56, 1999. Return to text.
Ref. 1, p. 140. Return to text.
Gurney, P.Westward.V., Our 'inverted' retina—is information technology really 'bad design'?, CEN Tech. J. xiii(1):37–44, 1999. Return to text.
Ref. 1, p. 183–184. Return to text.
Ref. one, p. 207. Return to text.
Ref. 1, p. 217. Return to text.
Ref. 1, p. 235. Known as the informal logical fallacy of 'poisoning the well'. Return to text.
Garner, P., Light-green River Dejection, Creation nineteen(3):eighteen–19, 1997. Return to text.
Run into Woodmorappe, J., The Mythology of Modern Dating Methods, Institute for Creation Enquiry, California, 1999. Return to text.
Snelling, A.A. , Can inundation geology explain thick chalk beds? , CEN Tech. J. 8(ane):eleven-15, 1994. Render to text.
Oard, Thou.J., The paradox of Pacific guyots and a possible solution for the thick 'reefal' limestone on Eniwetock Isle, CEN Tech. J. thirteen(1):one–2, 1999; Roth, AA, Fossil reefs and time, Origins 22(2):86–104, 1995. Return to text.
Ref. i, p. 242. Return to text.